A not overly strenuous (by Friday standards) puzzle to cap off a not overly strenuous crossword week. There was a fair bit of low (ie good) cunning to the wordplay here, but essentially, if you're comfortable with putting words inside other words or occasionally taking them out or jiggling them around, you have all the tools required to solve this ( Read more... )

Woof, this one felt proper Friday hard, and this coming after a week of pretty hard puzzles. To qualify that, about half of it was rather straightforward, but then you've got the explosion in a dictionary factory that are 1ac, 8ac, 25ac, 1dn, 7dn, 20dn. I am used to this kind of thing due to manfully tacking the Monthly Club Special 12 times a year ( Read more... )

The kind of puzzle that makes setting look effortlessly easy when of course know it's very hard indeed; pretty much every clue here combines perfect marriages of wordplay and surface with a magician's talent for misdirection, and it's even a pangram too. The best Friday crossword in ages for my money, bravo to the setter! FOI 11ac, LOI the cunning ( Read more... )

An agreeable middle-of-the-road solve, with a few odd elements that resulted in Minor Eyebrow Raise, but mostly entirely enjoyable. 28ac would have been a rather cryptically labour-intensive clue were it not for the fact that you can write it in from the first half, especially if you happen to be in Berkeley at the time. (Was anyone among our ( Read more... )

ACROSS
1 Doctor nearly retiring during great plague (8)
EPIDEMIC - MEDI{c} [doctor "nearly"] reversed inside EPIC [great]

9 Crime of America's neighbour probed by police (8)
HOMICIDE - HOMIE [America's neighbour] "probed" by CID [police]

10 Screen star's taken stimulant (8)
SUNSHADE - SUN'S HAD E [star's | taken | stimulant]

11 Instrument ( Read more... )

Simply a virtuoso puzzle and I'm only sorry that this proved such a busy month that I never found time to sit down and give it the many hours of sweet tortuous agony that I deserved. So many clues that I thought were well above averagely brilliant - 1ac, 2ac, 3ac, 18ac, 22ac, all of which contain cryptic devices of exceptional originality... and ( Read more... )

A straightforward puzzle by recent standards, with a not unpleasant mid-20th-century feel about it. I did it on paper, untimed, but I felt it was neither egregiously easy nor particularly difficult anywhere, and would guess I'd have clocked in at 7-8 minutes ish ( Read more... )

ACROSS ( Read more... )

ACROSS
1 Monkey beginning to descend tropical tree (8)
TAMARIND - TAMARIN [monkey] + D{escend}

5 Exile foreign ruler possessing good English (6)
EMIGRE - EMIR [foreign ruler] "possessing" G [good], + E [English]

10 Sleeper in tent with 150 flies around? You need this! (6,9 ( Read more... )

I'm going to say this *wasn't* the long-awaited pure stinker, but looking at the current state of the leaderboard, it does appear to have met the requisite level of difficulty for a Friday, and the Snitch confirms that it has pushed most solvers so far over well over their average time. For my part I finished just over the 10 minute park, held up ( Read more... )